Retraction notice: Post-fire mechanical properties of austenitic stainless steel rebars under air, water and furnace cooling

The publisher of Journal of Structural Fire Engineering, at the request of the authors, wishes to retract the article Yang S, Gao G (2026), “Post-fire mechanical properties of austenitic stainless steel rebars under air, water and furnace cooling”. Journal of Structural Fire Engineering, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 185-214, doi: Link to the DOI. The authors have brought it to our attention that there are methodological inconsistencies, ambiguities in experimental reporting, and interpretations and conclusions that are not sufficiently supported by the available evidence within the article to the extent that the research and its findings can no longer be relied upon. The authors cooperated fully with the investigation but were unable to address the issues within the scope of a corrigendum. During the course of our investigation into these issues, concerns were also raised as to the identity of the authorship on this article, with the email address provided at submission and correspondence for the author Gonglue Gao (xuzhifeng422@126.com) that of Zhifeng Xu, who is not connected to this work; the correct contact information for the author Gonglue Gao is as follows: 1996000022@jou.edu.cn; 896868096@qq.com. The authors were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation to address these concerns sufficiently. The decision to retract has been informed by COPE's guidelines on retractions and Emerald's publishing ethics policies. The publisher of the journal sincerely apologizes to the readers.